We are interested in the functional and neural architecture associated with semantic memory and language in healthy individuals, patients with brain damage, and blind and deaf individuals. Our lab uses several experimental approaches, including cognitive, neuropsychological and fMRI, to study the ways in which the brain represents and accesses knowledge about the meaning of words, objects and sounds.

We particularly welcome students with backgrounds of psychology, biology, and medicine to join our group, and welcome patients with neurological impairments to participate in our studies. See participation page for details.

We organized a “Promoting Cognitive Neuropsychology in China” workshop in April, 2006. Some talks were collected and published in a special issue of a Chinese journal “Advances in Psychological Science”, as listed below ：

Semantic and grammatical class information in the brainUpon seeing a word “cat”, you retrieve various information such as “pet”, “cute”, “tail”, “fluffy”. “mouse”, etc. Also it is a noun, meaning that you use the word according to a set of grammatical rules, which would be different from using a verb. How are these semantic and grammatical properties represented in the brain? We study these issues by means of cognitive neuropsychological studies of brain-damaged patients and cognitive experiments with healthy volunteers.

Writing and Reading Chinese characters are complex things. Reading and writing them involve analyses and production of strokes in complicated ways. What guides the reading and writing of these structures and how do these structures make contact with word meaning and sound? We investigate various aspects of the reading and writing processes of Chinese characters/words by looking at how the system breaks down due to brain injury in patients with acquired dyslexia (problems with reading) and acquired dysgraphia (problems with writing). Our focus is what we can learn about the universal mechanisms of reading and writing in general from studying unique aspects of Chinese patients.

Approaches:

Cognitive NeuropsychologyBy studying Chinese patients with language disorders resulting from brain damage, we can make inferences about the kinds of cognitive representations and processes that constitute the normal language system.

Cognitive PsychologyStudies of unimpaired individuals' performance on language production tasks, using behavioral measures like reaction time, answer fine-grained questions about the structure of representations and the time course of processing.